Timewell, Alex (2016) Thinking frames in popular music education - musical objects and identity in rehearsal: learning to psychoanalyse musicianship. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University. Downloaded from: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/617331/ Usage rights: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Deriva- tive Works 4.0 Please cite the published version https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk THINKING FRAMES IN POPULAR MUSIC EDUCATION MUSICAL OBJECTS AND IDENTITY IN REHEARSAL: LEARNING TO PSYCHOANALYSE MUSICIANSHIP A. TIMEWELL PhD 2016 THINKING FRAMES IN POPULAR MUSIC EDUCATION MUSICAL OBJECTS AND IDENTITY IN REHEARSAL: LEARNING TO PSYCHOANALYSE MUSICIANSHIP ALEX TIMEWELL A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute of Education Manchester Metropolitan University June 2016 Abstract This thesis is concerned with the teaching and learning of popular music, not as a process that can be defined and extrapolated, but as an interaction between musicians who consciously take on the roles of teacher and learner. The research project reported in this thesis focuses on the thinking that leads people to consider themselves to be musicians and how they frame their music making activities: their musicianship. Thinking takes place in the mind of people – their psyche. This thesis asks what psychoanalysis can contribute to research on music education, what insight can it bring to existing thinking frames that musicians and music teachers use? It explores how a reading of the work of Jacques Lacan may lead to new thinking frames that can help refine understandings of how musicians learn, how they identify with their own musicianship and how they interact with others. Set as an action research project, the researcher uses his own experiences and the discourses that his students, teachers and fellow musicians engage in, to consider how the language we use informs our thinking and to explore methods for overcoming common difficulties encountered in music learning environments. There are the practical considerations of the materials and activities musicians engage in, but significantly Lacan asks us to also consider our motivations to act. Enjoyment, its production and manifestation, lie beneath and motivate the way we use musical materials and how we choose which activities to engage in. Psychoanalysis employs challenging conceptions that have become entangled in anti-foundational philosophies concerning the truth and how we evaluate the world around us. The thesis takes key ideas: the master signifier; the split subject; the role of the Other in the psyche to create meaning; and jouissance, to understand how musicians think by mapping Lacan’s framework of the Graph of Desire onto musical language to produce a model of the internal dialogues of a musician's psyche. With the help of Slavoj Žižek's application of psychoanalysis to cultural studies the resulting language is used to analyse the discourse of professional musicians in rehearsal to understand how the ambiguity of language has an impact on the way musicians learn. The thesis then considers how this sits with formal teaching and learning discourses encountered in British educational contexts. It concludes that music teachers need to recognise the important role we play for our students in leading them into ownership of their musical learning and that anxiety has a place in helping us recognise that a fear of uncertainty forces us to provide only a partial knowledge to our students. Music teachers play the role of the 'subject supposed to know' to our students, one that if we are successful our students should eventually reject. Ultimately it is argued that whilst many of the conventions and thinking frames we use to understand music education are valid, there is a need to maintain the joy of music making as central to the motivations of musicians, whether they be acting in the role of performer, composer, producer, teacher or learner. Thinking Frames in Popular Music Education 5 Table of Contents Part 1 - Introduction 10 CHAPTER 1 – OVERVIEW 11 Problem 11 What is the research trying to achieve? 12 What is the remit of the research project? 16 Background of the researcher 21 A note from the researcher’s diary 23 Chapter Outline 27 CHAPTER 2 – LITERATURE REVIEW 31 What is music education? 31 Multi-cultural music education 36 Popular Music as a vocational area of study 41 Discourse and Ideology in education 46 CHAPTER 3 – METHODOLOGY 54 What is participant research? 54 Reification and Ideology 57 Deconstruction in Educational Theory 61 The Tools of Music Education 65 Anxiety and ownership 69 Culture and psychoanalysis 72 CHAPTER 4 – TERMINOLOGY 81 A note on the terminology used 81 Who is Jacques Lacan and who is Slavoj Žižek? 83 Uncertainty and anxiety 83 The subject 85 Registers of the psyche 86 Thinking Frames in Popular Music Education 6 Objects 88 This One Goes to Eleven! – Spinal Tap in a Psychoanalytic Frame 91 Part 2 – Thinking Frames – Research Projects 100 CHAPTER 5 – MUSIC THEORY, MUSIC TEACHERS, MUSIC CLASSROOMS 101 Introduction 101 Background 106 Perceptions of music 110 Educational frames 112 Research Project: How Do Perceptions of Music Theory Affect The Motivation Of Popular Music Students? 115 Research Project: Perceptions of the Purpose of Music Education 121 Research Project: The Tool Is Not the Object – Exploring Activity Theory Through the Application Of Music Technology In A Further Education Setting 125 Summary 127 CHAPTER 6 – LANGUAGE IN THE REHEARSALS OF PROFESSIONAL MUSICIANS 129 Ownership and identity 130 Designing the research project 131 Looking at the data 133 Practices of a contemporary music educator 135 Air on a G Thing – an anecdote 136 CHAPTER 7 – MUSIC EDUCATION AND OBJECTS WITH ŽIŽEK 141 Why Žižek changing everything makes a little difference to music education 141 Introduction 142 The Graph of Desire and the Lacanian registers 144 The little piece of the real and the object petit a 147 Drive circles the object 148 Hendrix as the object cause of desire 150 Thinking Frames in Popular Music Education 7 The plectrum of the Real 154 Driven to play 155 Precipitating Musicianship 156 CHAPTER 8 – MUSIC EDUCATION AND DESIRE WITH LACAN 159 ‘Psychoanalysing Musicianship: Identity in ‘Che Vuoi?’ and the ‘Subject Supposed To Know’ 159 Introduction 159 The trust placed in the teacher 160 The two stages of musicianship 163 Musical goals as symptoms 165 Identity, Identification and Beyond 166 Part 1 – Identity 169 The Ideological ‘Quilt’ 169 The ‘objet petit a’ in the formation of identity 171 Musicians in discourse 172 Part 2 – Identification 176 The retroactivity of meaning 176 The gaze and the ego 179 The internal dialogue of musicianship 180 Part 3 – Beyond Identification 183 ‘Che Vuoi?’ and the fantasy of reality 183 Enjoyment and drive 187 Ownership and Musicianship 191 The music teacher and the subject supposed to know 197 Part 3 – Analysis and Discussion 202 CHAPTER 9 - THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE MUSICAL REHEARSAL 203 Introduction 203 Problem and Hypothesis 204 Context of the research project 206 Development of nodes for analysis 207 Data Collection 210 Thinking Frames in Popular Music Education 8 Data Preparation 212 Data Analysis – Explanation of Nodes 213 Using the data to analyse nodes 216 Node: Discourse 217 Node: Musical Quality 219 Node: Musician 223 Node: Audience 225 Node: Performance 230 Node: Music 234 Node: Musicianship 238 Node: Musical Expression 242 CHAPTER 10 – CONCLUSIONS 244 Overview 244 Contexts 245 Musicianship 248 Psychoanalysis and music education 252 Implications 255 Conclusion 266 BIBLIOGRAPHY 267 Thinking Frames in Popular Music Education 9 Table of Figures Figure 1: Research Timeline ......................................................................... 13 Figure 2: Table of Binaries and Ulterior Counterparts ............................... 119 Figure 3: A Spectrum of Perceptions of Ownership in the Use of Music Language? ........................................................................................... 120 Figure 4: Questionnaire - Perceptions of the purpose of music education ............................................................................................................ 122 Figure 5: Perceptions of purpose survey - brief summary of results ......... 124 Figure 6: Slides from the multi-modal analysis of a music technology classroom ........................................................................................... 126 Figure 7: The Graph of Desire read backwards .......................................... 146 Figure 8: The Musician’s Dialogue – Stage 1 (Simple) ............................... 175 Figure 9: Retroversion in the interpellation of the subject ....................... 176 Figure 10: The 'Other' in the formation of Identity ................................... 178 Figure 11: The Musician's Dialogue – Stage 2 (Musical Evaluation) .......... 181 Figure 12: Fantasy responds to the desire of the 'Other' .......................... 185 Figure 13: Completed Graph of Desire....................................................... 188 Figure 14: The Musician's Dialogue – Stage 3 (Enjoying Musicianship) .... 195 Figure 15: Graph and Dialogue................................................................... 208 Thinking Frames in Popular Music Education 10 Part 1 - Introduction This research project has been undertaken by a music teacher and is intended to contribute to the literature on